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If an attorney finds he has made misrepresentations of fact or law, either deliberately or inadvertently, he shall immediately find an underling to publicly take the blame for it.
Isn’t that what it says in the ABA Rules of Professional Conduct?
Whoops, actually not. Someone really ought to let our esteemed Attorney General Bill Barr know, since he seems a little confused on the vagaries of legal ethics.
In a Wednesday interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Barr purported to have ample proof that mail-in voting is plagued by “substantial fraud and coercion.”
For example, we indicted someone in Texas, 1,700 ballots collected from people who could vote he made them out and voted for the person he wanted to. OK? That kind of thing happens with mail-in ballot. And everyone knows that.
In fact, everyone does not know that. And “we” didn’t indict anyone in Texas, much less for casting 1,700 fraudulent ballots.
As the Washington Post points out, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office indicted a man named Miguel Hernandez, Jr. on exactly one charge of second-degree felony illegal voting. And while a 1,700 count indictment would have been big news if it had happened — which it did not! — an indictment is not a conviction, and Barr knows perfectly well that it’s flimflammery to highlight an indictment and ignore the final adjudication of the case.
In this event, after an exhaustive investigation, prosecutors concluded that almost all of the ballots collected by Hernandez reflected the preference of the voter who signed them. He wound up pleading guilty on the single count, which is hardly evidence of a massive fraud in mail-in voting.
Attorney Andy Chatham, who prosecuted the case but is now in private practice, described it as “incredibly simple to ferret out” fraudulent ballots in Dallas County.
“We didn’t find any evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he told the Post.
So how could the Attorney General have been so mixed up? Must be those Deep State Obama holdovers at the DOJ trying to sabotage him!
“Prior to his interview, the Attorney General was provided a memo prepared within the Department that contained an inaccurate summary about the case which he relied upon when using the case as an example,” DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said yesterday. Party of personal responsibility!
“Unfortunately, it speaks volumes to the credibility of Attorney General Barr when he submits half-truths and alternative facts as clear evidence of voter fraud without having so much as even contacted me or the district attorney’s office for an understanding of the events that actually occurred,” Andy Chatham remarked to the Post.
But Barr was too busy spinning fantastical tales about Antifa supersoldiers flying around the country to foment riots while racking up frequent flier miles to worry about those picayune details.
Oh, hey …. about that.
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.